GWS 10 Study Guide - Quiz Guide: The Scientists, Disabilities Affecting Intellectual Abilities
23 Apr 2017
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Document Summary
Gws 10 beyond the pale: tainted whiteness, cognitive disability, and eugenic. The concept of feeblemindedness was based upon a racialized conception of intelligence, in which white people had normal + cognitive ability, while other races had subnormal cognitive ability. Feeblemindedness became gendered by linking to moral depravity aka sexual promiscuity. Involuntary sterilization of white people who were labeled feebleminded should be understood as a case of tainted white americans losing the full protection that whiteness had previously afforded them in a white supremacist society. The term eugenics was coined by the british naturalist francis galton, when he argued that human mental qualities could be manipulated or cultivated through selection in the same way that breeders control the qualities of domestic animals. This idea was spurred in the us in the late 1800s by white elites who feared off-white immigration and supposedly inherited forms of degeneracy . The us eugenic movement"s aim was the prevent the degeneration of the white race.
